City Walk

Universal Studios

City Walk is an entertainment retail venue adjacent to Universal Studios, Hollywood. JMA’s varied consulting and architectural work for Universal Studios includes the development of business components for City Walk in Hollywood and plans to establish proprietary retail-entertainment experiences in cities around the world.

In the 1980s JMA worked in San Francisco with Bill Kimpton and his team creating boutique hotels cross-bred with cafes. Kimpton’s food and beverage director left to work with George Lucas in the early 1990s an asked JMA to act as consulting creative director for Skywalker Development on the reinvention two failed shopping centers. George said, “ People go to shopping centers to do their daily work – to buy milk, a three-packs of socks or air conditioning filters. These centers aren’t working. What if people went to centers for fun? What would that look like?”

Hybrid thinking is the foundation of JMA’s practice. Most projects are conceptual hybrids. Our practice is a hybrid of several disciplines.  What hybrid concept could revive a shopping center? JMA considered compelling shopping experiences and assembly spaces of every kind; documenting and then analyzing experiences such as  purchasing carpets from Tibetan refugees a crossroads in Kathmandu, for raincoats on Carnaby Street in late sixies London, watching the parade while drinking on a balcony on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, negotiating for silver with Bedouins in the warren of souks in Marrakesh, jazz club experiences in lower Manhattan and Evanston,  shopping for antiques on Cat Street in Hong Kong in the early seventies, flea markets in LA, Indian street markets in Santa Fe, buying t-shirts at a Grateful Dead concert, etc. 

The research and analysis yielded a broad range of concepts for curation and  configuration of food and beverage, impulse retail and entertainment venues.  A recession curtailed the project with Skywalker, however our team went on explore concepts developed at Skywalker with at Universal Studios, with Walt Disney Company, in Las Vegas with Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas, at Autostadt for Volkswgen in Germany, in hotels, at department stores in Europe and Great Britian, in grocery stores in the US, etc.